The United Kingdom’s Electoral Commission, which oversees the country’s elections, announced on Tuesday that it had suffered a cyber attack by “hostile actors” who accessed its computer system for more than a year.
“We were the target of a complex cyber attack, and hostile actors had access to our systems,” the independent organization wrote on social network X (formerly Twitter), without revealing the identity of the authors of the attack who accessed the servers. Specifically, it contains copies of voter registers containing the personal data of millions of voters.
“We know which systems are accessed by hostile actors, but we have no way of knowing for sure which files and which have not been consulted,” Electoral Commission Director General Sean McNally said in a statement.
According to the Election Commission, the cyber attack was identified in October 2022 after suspicious activity was detected on its systems. It later became clear that “hostile actors” accessed the computers for the first time in August 2021.
“We regret that it took so long to find them,” McNally added, though he defended that “it is very difficult to use a cyber attack to influence the democratic process.”
It explained that the Election Commission should take appropriate measures, especially blocking access to pirates, assess the scale of the incident and put “additional security measures” in place before making the incident public.
After the 2016 Brexit referendum, British officials suspected Russia of trying to influence the vote in next year’s parliamentary elections.
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